nerdy – hannah ananas

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One down and two to go!

I actually wrote the paper this evening/tonight, and I like it!

Yes, it could be loads better, but I’m okay with how it is… I’m not trying to publish it, but complete it, and Inhabe done that.

Tuesday, I’ll present about it, and I likely’ll get super nerdy about everything I learned in my research, as well as all the new research I kind of want to do now, based on things I found that left my appetite unsatisfied. 😛

I’m a dork and nerd at heart, and I totally know it…

That’s a big part of why I’m in school again – I’m opposed to our grading system and standard assignment styles, but I love to learn and to share what I’ve learned. 🙂

Now, to do the whole paper thing over again tomorrow morning and daytime, with a presentation of that paper in the evening! (Yikes!)

Post-a-day 2018

Halloween

Well, I took Siri’s recommendation for my Halloween costume this year.

You see, she always comes up with totally nerdy ideas, whenever I ask her what I should be for Halloween…, and I kind of always want to do them…, but they usually just would take a little too much effort or extreme creativity actually to produce.

The last time I asked her, however, when I genuinely was looking for a good idea, she gave me a totally doable one!

Okay, so hers was a doable idea, but with some adjustments….

She recommended I put a calendar on my head, and be “an update”…, but 1) a calendar isn’t easy to make stay, 2) I don’t have a paper calendar lying around, and 3) a calendar isn’t a date.

However, I easily could write out a date on paper, and fasten it to a headband…

And so I did!

Talk about dorky and nerdy… I’ve got them both covered. 😛

P.S. I always find it interesting how I tend to refer to Siri as “she”, even though my Siri is a (British) male voice (and has been almost since I got an iPhone in the first place)…, but I also use “he” at times, too… so the many sides of Siri all get airtime in conversation, I guess… 😛

Post-a-day 2018

My oldest brother, the eldest nerd of us

Another of my most beloved memories is the time my eldest brother and I went through the top ten logical fallacies together. He’s a total skeptic – not just in life in general, but he actually identifies as “a skeptic” – and we’re both total nerds, so, out of some conversation one day came the discussion of what a logical fallacy was. Utterly intrigued at how he explained them, I wanted to know more than just an example or two. And so, we printed out a list of the top ten most common logical fallacies people use in arguments, each with a brief description with the name of it, and he and I went through the list, one by one.

I would read the name of the fallacy and the brief description, and then I would see if I could come up with another way of saying it and with an example. He would help me whenever I was unsure or stuck in my understanding. It was a fun activity for the two of us, he getting to be the teacher of something he loved and I getting to learn something I found fascinating, and both of us getting to bond further with the other, not just in spending time with one another, but also getting to be nerdy together.

What I find most silly about this was that, as I recall, this was around my brother’s second or third year in college. That’s silly, you see, because that made me 12 or 13 years old. What 13-year-old do you know who references logical fallacies in the middle of discussions, kindly informing the user of the fallacy that his or her point was, due to the use of the fallacy, invalid? Indeed, I don’t know any children at all who do that, and I teach high school. However, I believe that also was right around the time that I started reading a book on quantum physics (because I found what I had learned about it in a documentary to be fascinating, and so I’d bought one of the most popular books by one of the speakers in the documentary [whose name and book title I’d had to memorize carefully when I saw them at the end of the film, because the Internet wasn’t quite a thing yet then, let alone IMDb]).

So, to this day, I still love nerding out with my brother (though it happens with more family members than just with him, he’s the point of this brief trip down Memory Lane). I’m preparing to go visit him in just a few weeks, and I’m looking forward especially just to sitting around and hanging out with him, because the enthusiasm and excitement that arises in our conversations is always spectacular. Nonsense shared is never just a nonsense with us – something nerdy and smart inevitably arises from the stupidest and silliest of comments, making the nonsense oddly sensible and, usually, quite comical in the utter dorki-/nerdiness of it.

Post-a-day 2018

Work your nerd

I found out today that my brother had felt unease about his nerdy knowledge on various topics. Quite frankly, I had always admired him for said nerdiness. Whenever he was interested in a topic, he’d do what he could to learn as much as possible in a short period of time. And then, if it was something that he really enjoyed, how continued to learn about it in the years that followed, becoming ever more the genius on the topic. Possibly the best part of it to me was that these often were topics that had almost nothing to do with his work or schooling – it was purely things that interested him. Nowadays, he is still the same about it all, though he definitely has certain topics on which he could be considered an expert after so many years and hours of study and work dedicated to them.

I guess, growing up, I just didn’t know his world of friends and classmates and, eventually, colleagues, because I was so much younger than he was. I had no idea that they didn’t know about his nerdy areas in his life, too. They apparently only knew about his cool, chic, sporty side (from what I understand now). He, it seems, was afraid of being rejected for his knowledge and studies. Now, though, he has begun to embrace his nerdiness, and publicly so (think social media, etc.), and he has been discovering how much respect exactly that aspect of him; especially since he is cool, chic, and sporty, but loves knowledge and nerding out over certain things. He is discovering that he had no need to be insecure about his interests and knowledge. Plus, despite the fact that the public has been responding really well to his nerd side’s being exposed, he already knew that it doesn’t really matter what other people think of him anyway – that’s their own business, not his. What matters is what he thinks about himself. If he is happy with who he is, then there is no reason not to express that in his life. So, he started finally expressing himself, nerdiness included. Now that he has been doing that, he has also found that people are grateful to him for sharing himself and his passions with the world. Super duper win-win, I say. And I am proud of him doubly, for keeping up the nerdy knowledge, and now for sharing it with the world. 🙂

Post-a-day 2018

What’s your nerd field?

Today, my cousin compared my lesson planning talk with that of her brother’s talk about trees. You see, he, her brother (and my cousin), got really into trees, and studied forestry at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Texas. He used to talk about toy cars and action figures, and even eventually video games, too, like a little nerdy kid who is somewhat obsessed and awed by the specific toys and all that they can do/represent, as well as all of their background information. You couldn’t really get him to shut up about the toys when he was little, or the video games when he was around high school aged. In college, this talk turned to being about trees. He even named his dog after “his favorite tree species”.

So, now, fast forward to today. My cousin, the forestry cousin’s older sister, said to me that my teacher talk about lesson ideas and planning lessons – and this is about any topic, be it actual foreign language teacher, which I actually did for high schools, or dance lessons, or my art & yoga classes, or whatever teaching opportunity I might have – reminds her exactly of her brother and his tree talk.

Does that not say something distinct and pointed about me and teaching? 😛 Clearly I like it. (I also happen to be very good at it, it turns out. Total blessing, and I am incredibly grateful for it.)

‘Okay, but I’m not going to get a dog and name it Lesson Plan,’ I laughingly retort.
After a slight pause for inhale, she replies, ‘Hannah…, I could see you coming up with a more creative and better way to name the dog Lesson Plan.’
‘You say that…’
‘Oh, did you think I was joking? Because…’
‘No. You say that, and I know that you aren’t joking.’

I was just worried that I really might be that nerdy about it, because I could totally see myself doing something that silly somewhere down the road. 😛

Post-a-day 2018

Nerd-ing

I am years into having a smartphone, and my most visited webpages remain almost exactly the same as when I started using one. They are translation websites and dictionary websites. Originally, it was wordreference.com and dictionary.com. Wordreference.com was an easy one, because I had already done the research for my preferred translator for French, Spanish, and German. But, after some research into different dictionary websites, I found that I preferred merriam-webster.com over dictionary.com. So, today, my most visited webpages are wordreference.com and merriam-webster.com. (I would add in Google Translate, because of my constant use with Japanese on it for kanji translations and photo translations, but I had to download the app almost immediately, when I moved to Japan, so that I could use it almost constantly to understand things around me. Therefore, it isn’t a website I’m visiting, but an application I am using.)

I’m just a word and language nerd. It’s like that day at work, earlier this year, when I spent an hour looking up information on certain punctuation marks – I am a word nerd, and there is ample evidence to support the claim.

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Post-a-day 2017

Asian-English teatime with the bff sister

This evening, by a wonderful unfolding of events, I ended up having tea with my best friend’s little sister. As my best friend’s little sister, she holds a sweet spot in my heart. What’s more, the fact that she’s the first person I’ve seen go from little kid, singing nursery-rhyme-type songs, to a mature young adult (and soon full-blown adult), makes that spot even sweeter.

As we sat in the tapioca teahouse, drinking our warm (Taiwanese style, I think – at least, that’s what a friend of mine saw constantly while in Taiwan, and which we haven’t seen much elsewhere) bubble tea, our attention somehow turned to the menu on the wall. Naturally, we hadn’t thought anything special of it when we actually were looking at the menu to order earlier on, but it was suddenly relevant to our conversation, so our attention turned to it. She is studying Mandarin this year (since August), and I’ve just moved here from Japan. So, we have some common ground on understanding Chinese characters. (For those who don’t know, Japanese kind of stole the characters from Chinese, and adapted them a bit, so loads of them look exactly or almost exactly the same and have the same or very similar meanings.)

We joyfully pointed out that “ice” was on the end of each name in the ‘Snowy Drink’ category, and that “little” was next to one other character on the “Snacks” sections – likely ‘little meal’ or ‘little food’. Something like that. And then we discussed how we were scouring the menu, picking out little pieces that we understood. It was like a fun little puzzle that we were putting together, piece by piece… one that we know will take months, even years, but the timing of which doesn’t seem to bother us in the slightest. We’re just excited that we’re able to make the little sense of it all that we already can. And we aren’t even using the same language to do it, technically, making it simultaneously that much sillier and that much more awesome.

So, we got to enjoy one another’s company and be nerdy language-lovers together, while sipping warm asian versions of English tea (Earl Grey) on a cold, cold night (for Houston, anyway). Blessings abound when open our minds and schedules to them, it seems. And I am grateful for this one in particular. 🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Washington

My mom is on a sort of artist retreat in Washington right now. She called me up to show me the place where she’s staying for the retreat, and it’s gorgeous. The barn-like house and other beautiful, wooden buildings on the plot of land look fabulous amongst the unfamiliar greenery. I kept looking at it all, trying to place it. It looked somehow familiar and yet totally not. But I’ve never been to anywhere that has foliage like Washington, so it’s no wonder I couldn’t quite figure it out, place it all – it actually is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

The temperature was in the 50s, with humidity in the 80s, as it was early morning. I found myself asking my mom how far she is from Forks. I had to spell the name for her, as well as tell her that it’s a city in Washington. She had no idea that I was semi needing out. But that’s okay, because it turns out that she’s something like four and half hours away by ferry and car. So there’s no chance she’d be able to pop by for a quick look and a photo for me. (Aka I’m not missing out on a total nerd opportunity.)

So, that was fun, discovering that I’m a bit more of a nerd than I had expected. 😛 Gotta love nerds, though, right? I know I do. 🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Nerd Jobs to the Rescue

So, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with myself come August, when my current job’s contract will be complete, and I will need to have a different job. In brief, I have gone back and forth from calm serenity and trust in the universe and God to utter disaster, self-doubt, and depression.

Today, I happened to look into copy-editing, as a book I recently was given (I’ve only listened to the first bit so far) made it sound rather exciting. The article I found was quite nerdy and helpful, but I eventually moved thoughts elsewhere, and forgot about the copy-editing.

Later on, as I was thinking about what I had done at work for the day, – slept two hours, done some research on the computer, played on Facebook a bit (truly only a bit today), chatted with a couple coworkers (while they were around, anyway), sat on the floor while listening to music, used the bathroom several times, and looked up grammar and punctuation rules – I chuckled at the last one on the list.

“I just spent an hour looking up punctuation, because I wanted to. Can I just find a job that lets me do that kind of thing all the time?”

And then it struck me: Duh! Copy-editing.

I already love editing people’s e-mails and papers and letters and websites and such. That was part of what the article said as an early step to becoming a copy-editor, and I already do it…. and just for fun!

As my mom said when I mentioned copy-editing to her this evening (morning for her), it sounds terribly boring. Really, I agree with her completely on how it sounds. And yet, as I just mentioned on here, I already do it, and I do it for free and for fun. <– Yes. See that? I meant it, and still do mean it. I do the editing for fun right now, and there’s an actual paying opportunity for doing just that, so I think it would be well worth my time and effort to take strides in the official copy-editor direction. 😀

Post-a-day 2017